Hello all

I am an analog electrical engineer by trade engaged in self teaching myself Analysis / Particle Physics and Astrophysics for the last couple of years.

I have worked in the computer graphics field for almost 30 years, ranging from hardware / chip design / device drivers and compilers with 30 patents along the way.

I wrote gobs of the original OpenCL framework while working for that big company in Cupertino, a lot of my spare time spent programming is in simulation using graphics processors, multithreaded programs and big number mathematics.

Staff: Mentor

Welcome to PF!

For OpenGL you might be interested in the Processing IDE with lots of OpenGL java examples to create interactive art in java. Its very light-weight for a professional programmer but still fun to play with and to use for prototyping ideas. That's my main use for it. Its has a couple of dozen third party libraries the most notable is PixelFlow which can generate some amazing interactive graphics examples.

For numerical computing, there's a new kid on the block called Julia (julialang.org). It looks to be a replacement for MATLAB with a lot of interoperability features for C, R, Python and Fortran.

Lastly, there is also the OpenSourcePhysics (www.compadre.org/osp), a collections of java code to do physical simulations using several ODE solvers. Comes with many examples and works with Eclipse of Netbeans IDE.

I have played with Processing, it was fun for small stuff... but it had no debug capabilities other than printf's so I gave up on that and just write event based loop apps in SDL or Cocoa on OS X. I worked on the guts for OpenGL and OpenCL for years so I know my way around that... my language of choice is C / C++ as all my tools and background are there so it just makes it easier to use.

I splurged this year and purchased the home version of Mathematica, once you get a bit of it... the rest is intuitive. I now use that as a prototyping platform, it's supported well documented and since I paid for it.. I should be using it.

I get those imaginary numbers and transformations stuck in my head also, my daughter wants to be a math major.. I checked out the requirements and realized analog EE's only need 4 additional classes to get a math major!

I get those imaginary numbers and transformations stuck in my head also, my daughter wants to be a math major.. I checked out the requirements and realized analog EE's only need 4 additional classes to get a math major!

I am happy I'm not the only one! My wife calls me a cuckoo bird or a nutzoid!

I wouldn't mind those pesky imaginary numbers except for those sharp exclamation points, sometimes they feel like cactus needles or something!